'The Adventists' Film to Feature LLUMC

Editor's Note: This report has been updated to include corrected information from Loma Linda University Media Relations. The film will air on Aug. 29.

Loma Linda University Medical Center will be featured in "The Adventists," a PBS documentary scheduled to air on KVCR at 8 p.m. August 29, a university spokeswoman announced this week.

The one-hour documentary film "highlights various aspects of LLUMC and how, as a Seventh-day Adventist institution, the hospital innovates excellence through cutting-edge medicine and Christ-centered care," Briana Pastorino of Loma Linda University said in a statement.

"The film also explores the history and contemporary story of Seventh-day Adventists, a faith-group whose members are some of the healthiest and longest-living people on the planet," Pastorino said.

Dr. Leonard Bailey of Loma Linda University Medical Center is profiled in the documentary as he performs surgery on a five-month old baby awaiting a new heart, Pastorino said.

"Every moment while participating in an infant heart transplant . . . is a miracle one way or another," Bailey said. "The fact that we can stop a baby's heart and start it back up again---there’s something miraculous about that."

Bailey is surgeon-in-chief at Loma Linda University Medical Center, Pastorino said.

He helped pioneer infant heart transplant in the mid-1980s "when he transplanted the heart of a baboon into a child who became known as Baby Fae," Pastorino said.

Martin Doblmeier, director of "The Adventists," was inspired to make the film after visiting LLUMC, Pastorino said.

"This was a great idea for a film because what you have is this juxtaposition between a faith tradition that people, I think, call conservative and traditional, and at the same time it’s promoting 21st century, cutting edge medical science and wellness," Doblmeier said. "The balance of those two things I found fascinating, and that became the genesis for the film."

KVCR is the Inland Empire's public television network.

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